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I have been thinking a lot lately about the challenge we face as educators when well-intentioned learners make incorrect, inscrutable, thoughtless, or otherwise off-the-mark comments. It's a crucial moment in teaching: how do you respond to an unhelpful remark in a way that 1) dignifies the attempt while 2) making sure that no one leaves thinking that the remark is true or useful? Summer is a great time to think about the challenge of developing new routines and habits in class, and this is a vital issue that gets precious little attention in training and staff development. Here is a famous Saturday Night Live skit, with Jerry Seinfeld as a HS history teacher, that painfully demonstrates the challenge and a less than exemplary response. Don't misunderstand me: I am not saying that we are always correct in our judgment about participant remarks. Sometimes a seemingly dumb comment turns out to be quite insightful. Nor am I talking about merely inchoate or poorly-worded contributions. That is a separate teaching challenge: how to unpack or invite others to unpack a potentially-useful but poorly articulated idea. No, I am talking about those comments that are just clunkers in some way; seemingly dead-end offerings that tempt us to drop our jaws or make some snarky remark back. My favorite example of the challenge and how to meet it comes from watching my old mentor Ted Sizer in action in front of 360 educators in Louisville 25 years ago. We had travelled as the staff of the Coalition of Essential Schools from Providence to Louisville to pitch the emerging Coalition reform effort locally. Ted gave a rousing speech about the need to transform the American high school. After a long round of applause, Ted took questions. The first questioner asked, and I quote: "Mr Sizer, what do you think about these girls and their skimpy halter tops in school?" (You have to also imagine the voice: very good-ol'-boy). Without missing a beat or making a face, Ted said "Deco

"This list came from a crowd-source appeal via Twitter and an email to colleagues and friends. Each book on the list received at least 5 votes from the 50 or so folks who responded; good enough for me"

Education for Everyone. We offer courses from the top universities, for free. Learn from world-class professors, watch high quality lectures, achieve mastery via interactive exercises, and collaborate with a global community of students.

"Use engaging videos to create customized lessons. You can use, tweak, or completely redo any lesson featured on TED-Ed, or create lessons from scratch based on any video from YouTube. Watch the video to learn how. "

"In their book, Turning Learning Right Side Up: Putting Education Back on Track, authors Russell L. Ackoff and Daniel Greenberg point out that today's education system is seriously flawed -- it focuses on teaching rather than learning. "Why should children -- or adults -- be asked to do something computers and related equipment can do much better than they can?" the authors ask in the following excerpt from the book. "Why doesn't education focus on what humans can do better than the machines and instruments they create?" "Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth learning can be taught." -- Oscar Wilde"

The 4th of July: a great time to think about independence. No, not yours or mine; the students' independence. What curricular plan do you have for giving students increasing intellectual autonomy next year? Rate This In my previous post on transfer, I discussed what it is and isn't. Here, I draw from the research and highlight the key teacher 'take-aways' in terms of what the research suggests for practice. Most of the quotes come from Chapter 3 in How People Learn. Other sources are referenced at the end."

"In the social web each of us becomes a node of information. We are allowed to connect to friends, people, sites, information. We are allowed to consume, produce, share, learn, recreate, remix, and be as large or as small a node as we want. Education in the 21st Century is not about consuming information (it changes to fast), it's about creating new knowledge from what we know, what we think, and what we are passionate about."

""We saw how the best practices we were witnessing could inform a really transformative school model," Healy said. Here are their 6 chief take-aways from what they saw and learned about schools that work.

Themeefy is a cool new way to discover, curate, compile and publish knowledge from the web to create your personal Theme magazine.

"The author shares findings from her action research, focusing on the question, "How can I use critique to improve the quality of student feedback, student work and create a culture of collaboration?" "

"We recommend discussing explicitly the purpose, associated practices, and changed roles that the use of Essential Questions entails. Here are some examples of key ideas framed as sentences to be spoken in class to prepare students for the changes: "There's not a single correct answer for this question. Life is about the consideration of plausible and imperfect alternatives." "Coming to understand important ideas is like fitness: it takes practice over time." "When a question is posted on the wall, it means that we are going to consider it again and again." "Inquiry is not a spectator sport: each of you needs to listen actively and participate." "Everyone is fair game. I won't only call on people who raise their hands." "If and when I or others challenge your comment, it doesn't mean we don't like you or don't value your contribution." "Making mistakes is an expected part of learning. If you never take a risk of making a mistake, you're not likely to improve." "You may find that you are re-considering things that you thought you understood. That is normal - even desirable." Like the care of seedlings, the new rules will require patience, careful nurturing, and constant reminders. Overtime, they will become the norms, allowing big ideas to take root and mature understandings to blossom."

"I knew where I wanted the question to lead but decided I was more committed to giving my students a voice than I was to accomplishing my project idea. I wanted our projects to be about "work that matters," but it needed to matter to the students not just me. I wanted their project-based learning to stem from their own empathy."

"Once the students had selected a topic from our over-arching theme of civil/human rights, and I had a rubric, it was time for the real work to begin. We started our project-based learning by making a list on the board of things we know about the topic followed by a list of things we "need to know." Basically, we completed the K and W of our KWL chart (PDF)."

"I decided to use the teacher console on Diigo to create groups for each of my classes. I used handouts and tips from Bill Ferriter's Digitally Speaking Wiki to get everything set up and explain to the student how I wanted them to find, annotate, and share resources and information. (I highly recommend Bill's resources. They saved me a ton of time.) The students had used Diigo for research on a project during a previous school year so I thought with Bill's handouts and the boys' previous experience we were in good shape to begin. I soon learned differently. We have a 1:1 laptop classroom and the boys have a natural tendency to head straight to Google any time they have a question, but it was obvious after the first day that they weren't finding the quality resources they needed. Additionally, some boys still didn't know (or forgot) how to share to a group while others didn't know how to write a quality annotation. I had assumed too much. They needed what Mike Kaechele calls a "teacher workshop" on searching for information and on how to use Diigo. They needed me to model what they should do."

"The feedback from teachers has been incredible to our top 10 twitter accounts for teachers. We would like to continue to provide great resources for teachers and educators, so we are continuing to add to our list."

"Publishing student thinking can be among the most powerful ways to improve learning. There are a variety of reasons for this, but the biggest reason is that the "threat" of publishing moves the lodestone from the classroom to the "real world." This, of course, changes everything."

Ramsey Musallam, a high school chemistry teacher from the San Francisco Bay Area, has been creatively using digital tools in his classroom for several years as a way to drive students to deeper inquiry. In a recent TED talk, Musallam says that a teacher's strongest tool - the force that draws students deeper into learning - is piquing students' curiosity. In his classroom, Musallam follows three rules: curiosity comes first, embrace the mess, and reflect and revise.

"In the process of writing and finalizing the chapter on "Visual Notetaking" for my forthcoming eBook, "Mapping Media to the Common Core," I found Giulia Forsythe's blog page "Visual Practice" and her WONDERFUL presentation a year ago for the 2012 University of Mary Washington Faculty Academy. Her presentation slides are available on SlideShare, and the entire 68 minute, recorded presentation is on Vimeo. I highly recommend you watch this entire presentation if you're interested (as you should be) in learning more about visual notes."

"Now that half of the school year is over, teachers often find themselves needing a better organization plan for their classroom. Dropbox is a free service (there are paid levels as well) teachers can use to store and access their files from any device. It also provides a way to share files between classes and between students and teachers."

From the student's perspective, the difficulty of living two lives - GT and SpEd